Vintage Book Review: Beauty for Ashes

Today’s book review is for a vintage book in my collection: Beauty for Ashes by Grace Livingston Hill. I read it in January as part of the Read Your Bookshelf challenge hosted by Chantel Reads All Day with the prompt “beauty.”

Disclosure: This post includes Amazon affiliate links. The Kindle version of this book is currently only .99.

My Review

Beauty for Ashes was written in 1935, but it takes place a few years earlier, during Prohibition. The setting is rural Maine. It’s a double romance novel with sisters Gloria and Vanna, who start as wealthy New York City socialites.

The novel opens with Gloria’s imminent wedding being canceled due to the sudden death of her fiance. In the second chapter, Gloria’s father takes her on a road trip to his childhood home in Maine, where she ends up staying for most of the book. Later, Vanna joins her there and–if it’s not too much of a spoiler–they both fall in love with handsome, upstanding local men who lead them to Christ, but not without some thrilling mishaps along the way.

Contrived and predictable? Yup. (As are most of GLH’s novels.) But sweet and satisfying? Yeah, that, too.

As I’ve mentioned before, I read most of GLH’s books in the 1980s when I was in my teens. I think of them as literary “comfort food,” and I enjoy grabbing one to re-read every now and then. Lately, as I’ve been re-reading them I’ve started making notes of books and hymns mentioned in the novels. Here’s my list from Beauty for Ashes.

Books within the book

For three days… she spent most her time on the front porch reading…

The second day, she heard whistling, and it cheered her a little… But Gloria had discovered Lorna Doone, and was deep in the thrills of romance and adventure. She did not stop to think about the whistler except to be glad that he was there making cheery noises.

The third day, however, she had come to the end of her book and was lying back thinking it over, all its sweetness and sadness, beauty and tragedy, comparing it with her own life, realizing how different her lover had been from the lover in the story…

[Later.] “That’s a peach of book you were reading,” the young man said as they crossed the road and swung into his gate. “This isn’t the first time you’ve read it, of course.”

“Why, yes, it is,” said Gloria. “I never came on it anywhere. Do you know it?”

“Yes, it’s one of my old favorites. I read it several times when I was a kid, and I like to go over it again now and then. There’s some fine writing in it, besides being a rare story, and so utterly human and thrilling.”

She looked at him, surprised. The young men she knew did not discuss books in such a way, especially such books. In fact most of them read very few books and seldom spoke of them.

I’ve never read Lorna Doone. Have you? I guess I need to add it to my TBR list if it’s such a wonderful book as that!

Hymns

I had to do a little detective work to discover the titles of the songs referred to in Beauty for Ashes. Grace Livingston Hill likes to include snippets of lyrics, but they aren’t necessarily from the first verse, and she doesn’t usually mention the title of the song. I found free printable sheet music for all three of these at Hymnary.org. They aren’t songs I know (though I am familiar with the Tennyson poem, Crossing the Bar), but I enjoyed banging them out on the piano just to see what they sounded like.

• Crossing the Bar— sung at the erstwhile fiance’s funeral by “a well-paid quartet of well-trained male voices”
• Christ Is Coming–“And so she fell asleep, with the haunting tune of a lovely song that had been sung at the close of the service…”
• What Did He Do?–“Again that striking chorus, those questions and answers!”

Other Grace Livingston Hill book reviews

• Crimson Mountain – In which I decide I’m not mechanically inclined.
• The Enchanted Barn – In which my friend and her family move into a barn.